I am a horrible person because I have done this twice to the same pair of guys. And I am even more horrible because I have admitted that I’ve done this to other people because I can’t get over how awful I am. And no, I don’t think I’ve been given absolution. I just feel kind of cruddy. And I am never ever going to make that mistake again even if I said that the first time I made it.

So #2 and I had a lengthy conversation about whether or not it’s a good thing for Huffington Post to spend space showing all the good things the people of Ferguson are doing for each other. She argues that that’s nice and all but it doesn’t keep the police from being racist assholes. My argument (and I’m right) is that by showing the humanity of the people, the real people of Ferguson, is much harder to “other” them and to paint them all with one racist brush. The teachers, the librarians, the people giving rides to people because “it isn’t safe for a young black man to be out walking alone.” There’s a lot of people in the CNN comments section (before they shut them off) blaming the riots on black people being bad. Heck, there’s ARTICLES on CNN doing that. The more we see of the humanity of people, the more we see that they’re individuals, the less people are able to do that. Stories are important for public opinion and public opinion is important for policy. Here, Cloud explains why it’s important. And here’s how you can help.

This is wrong. Actually, #2 and I had a lengthy conversation about that too and she says that it actually works in place of rice but it isn’t worth the effort. Except not sushi rice. I concede that any substitution for potatoes is probably fine (though not as good as the original potatoes) because cheese and deep frying make up for a wealth of deficiencies. Of course, that sort of loses the point of being healthy.

Did we link to this xykademiqz comic? I think we did, but #2 sent it to me again because she never reads all the links I send her. If we didn’t, we should have. And all the other ones too. Everyone, just go to the blog and read them all if you’re not already a regular, which you should be.

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I prepare cauliflower “rice” at least once a week now. It’s actually just jim-dandy. We do sorta paleo/primal diet where it’s all veggies, fruits, meats, dairy and pretty much no pasta, bread products or processed foods. It’s a boatload of work as a diet/way of life, mind you, but we’re all a lot more fit, healthy and such than we were before we started.

With DC2 still getting rashes from wheat and me not supposed to eat refined carbs, it’s definitely tempting to switch to more paleo-like diets (with dairy!) But instead we’re still eating a lot of brown rice, corn products, quinoa, and potatoes. As DC2 weans we’re going to need to re-examine that (nursing keeps a lot of the PCOS symptoms at bay). I don’t think ricing cauliflower is in our future though. Cutting it up and covering it with cheese, sure. I do need to cut down on the corn products eventually.

re: crazy white people stirring up trouble: A good question is how it got to be a “revolutionary” to be against “wars of empire” and “mass incarceration”… can we really see no nonviolent democratic route to ending those things??
Also, the twitter account for TheMissouriTorch is engaging with people by insinuating Dorian Johnson was lying. I do not take them to be impartial observes, and you might check out Melissa Harris Perry re: the history of the politics of the terminology of “outside agitator”
Full disclosure- There are several Chicago-area communists I’m fond of (though not the ones in the video) and I’m particularly impressed by the (admittedly local to St. Louis) 90 year old holocaust survivor who got arrested in Ferguson. I think it likely people who make a habit of political dissent have … interesting personality quirks (and many of their songs are, musically speaking, quite stupid). I don’t think that means they can’t do good work. Or maybe their tactics are hopeless and bad… but their aims? Those make sense to me.

re: military grade equipment- giving this to police forces is a bit crazy. Setting up a rule that they can’t get any more if they don’t prove they us it within a year? that’s plumb stupid.

re: good stories on CNN- I’d taken it just as a Mr. Rogers kind of thing (“look for the helpers”), a necessary thing because there’s so much visceral pain associated with these stories that keeping folks able to turn their attention back to the matter is itself a service.

Re: mashup of other links: I think the “invasive procedures work better” psychology trick applies to diets. Paleo works for weight loss/ feeling healthy BECAUSE it’s so much more work. As as any diet becomes popular enough to be a “market segment”, convenience foods appearing in the stores ruin it for everyone.

I looked for a reputable journalist writing about the out-of-town people coming to the protests, and could not find one. So it is hard to know what really happened. But I saw many tweets from people in the community complaining about outsiders who weren’t at the protests for the same reasons as the community. Antonio French, the St. Louis alderman whose Twitter account helped show what was happening in Ferguson, posted several times about out-of-town protesters coming to stir up more violence in protests that the community clearly wanted to be peaceful. There were at least a couple of videos of specific white protesters being asked to leave by the community leaders, because they were trying to incite the crowd to be more violent.

I don’t care what their politics are. White people coming into a protest in a Black community and trying to direct it to their own ends are in the wrong. That is horrible behavior, especially since the potential costs of participating in a violent protest are so much higher for young black men. If those white people want to protest something other than the unjust treatment of the black community by police, they are free to do so. Morally, though, I think they should organize their own protests and not try to co-opt the ones the people in Ferguson organized.

The 90 year old Holocaust survivor and many other white people were there protesting the same thing as the organizers, and were following the lead of the black people who were leading the protests. To me, that is completely different from white people who came in and tried to change the nature of the protests.

One thought I had (in terms of how best to use white privilege for good rather than for evil) was that we should give every black person in Ferguson a white lawyer with a video camera. That would solve some of the unemployment problem for JDs as well. (Tongue-in-cheek. But still.)

It seems to me that it’s all connected. Mass incarceration contributes to so few blacks being registered to vote that we end up with a jury pool with 3 blacks. That may prevent justice for Mike Brown. Wars of empire lead to surplus military equipment for cops that then use it like they are in a warzone under a particularly brutal dictatorship. That may have contributed to the us v. them mentality of the police.
Is it wrong to appropriate someone else’s struggle for your own gain? Yes. Is it wrong to express solidarity for the fight that you’ve been fighting for decades with this new case of cops behaving badly? No.
My twitter feed was filled with tweets from Ferguson. An occasional person thought some of the out of town people were misguided. However, the conservative talk radio stations were full of disparaging remarks about “outside agitators” (again if you don’t watch Melissa Harris-Perry, you should google that phrase and her name for the key clip)… my considered opinion is that critiquing people for having bullhorns and singing “stupid songs” is more in line with the later than the former. I think it’s rhetoric that serves as a thin veil of psudeo-respectability around the sociopathic “you shouldn’t help *those* people” mentality.
And, of course, it did not escape my attention that the cops that arrested the 90 year old white woman looked very different than the cops addressing the young black man with dreads we saw earlier in the week. I think that’s part of the point- those different people becoming involved *proved* the area police departments had better options for dealing with the agitators.

I don’t watch Fox news. My Twitter feed was also full of tweets from and about Ferguson. I do try to watch Melissa Perry Harris when I can make the time to watch things instead of reading them. And I’m going to leave it at that.

In my experience, a lot of times the “out of town agitators” turn out to either be undercover officers or paid informant/provocateurs. One protest I attended, about half of those arrested were never booked, which is often a sign that they have police ties, and about 10% were formally identified as undercover officers when they later testified in court.

There was a pretty big case after the RNC in St Paul a few years ago, where the “outside agitator” anarchist who talked 2 other people into agreeing to make molotov cocktails (they actually no-showed on the planned action, so they didn’t actually make them or do anything with them – they were eventually charged with having the materials and the intent to make/use them). It turned out he’d been in the pay of the FBI for several years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Darby#2008_Republican_Convention_activities

There was a Ferguson solidarity protest and march in my town this past weekend (had to miss it!), but one of the organizers noted on the FB event page that their contacts in Ferguson preferred if people stayed out. They’d experienced too many coming for the “ogle” opportunity, and others who were trying to direct things to their own ends. So that’s how my town ended up with a solidarity march, and active discouragement (with explanations, obvs.) of organizing a field trip.

In anticipation and response, the police and City Council have worked to address people’s concerns about racialized policing and – in particular – militarized police forces. Made commitment statements, etc. And I think this was a good opportunity for local groups and the city’s Human Rights Commission to work more closely to address all the interconnected issues. Solidarity, but focusing as well on local options.

The article reads like a lament. Both of us grew up with very little a/c. Far from being nostalgic for street life with our fellow kids (who mostly hated us), we grew up and swore we’d never be too hot and covered in mosquito bites ever again. Sleeping outside? Yeah, NO. Besides, without a/c there is little sleep to be had when the night air never cools off. I also can’t digest food when I’m too hot, either. Bring on the a/c!

We still remember when the power went out in Chicago one summer when we were kids (it was on the radio pretty constantly because it was so horrific). A lot of people died. Without a/c there would be a lot more dead poor people.

a/c is a chapter of urban economics… without a/c there would still be no real cities in the South. (And it doesn’t get below 88 degrees at night…)

Without a/c as a kid, I spent a LOT of time in the basement not playing with other kids. When I lived in Santa Barbara, where the weather is always wonderful, I spent a lot of time outside playing with other kids (even though they mostly hated me).

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